Neighborhood of the week: A village known for its quarries

Granite for columns of Providence’s historic Arcade building came from the Johnston village.

JOHNSTON, R.I. — A small village known and named for its granite quarries, Graniteville is centered around Route 44, near the neighboring villages of Centredale and Greystone in North Providence.

The granite for the columns of the historic Arcade building, which opened in Providence in 1822, was quarried on Pine Hill in Graniteville.

The village, which is near the massive Greystone Lofts building, a former mill in North Providence, was never heavily industrialized, but for a short time, it was home to the only powder mill ever built in Rhode Island. Built in 1776, the mill blew up in 1779. Smith Street, also known as Putnam Pike and Route 44, was once known as the Powder Mill Turnpike.

Johnston was established in 1636 as a part of Providence, but it was separated from the city in 1759. It was named for Augustus Johnston, a Tory who fled the country in 1779 during the Revolutionary War, after serving as Rhode Island’s attorney general from 1758 to 1766.

The Angell family were early Johnston settlers, and the family’s land holdings included a large parcel in Graniteville, according to the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission. “The Angell family in Johnston descended from Thomas Angell, who came from England as an apprentice with Roger Williams in 1631,” the commission’s Johnston survey report said.

“Two eighteenth-century Angell farmhouses in that area are now on the National Register — the Daniel Angell House (c. 1725) on Dean Avenue, and the Edwin H. Farnum House (c. 1765) on Putnam Pike.”

“Johnston, although heavily urbanized and suburbanized, has an unusual number of well-preserved eighteenth-century houses,” the report said, adding that several examples of mill housing survive on Angell Street in Graniteville.

Another surviving historic building is the quaint, white-clapboard Graniteville Baptist Church at 82 Serrel Sweet Rd. The building is now in the middle of a residential neighborhood on the streets ascending up a hill from Route 44.

According to the Johnston Historical Society, the railroad era ended in Johnston in 1962, when the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad terminated freight service on the rail line that ran through Graniteville (the former Providence & Springfield Railroad). Another neighborhood institution, the Graniteville elementary school, was closed in 2008.

Homes for sale in the neighborhood include a three-bedroom home at 10 Milner Field Rd., priced at $244,900; a three-bedroom ranch at 29 Chestnut St., priced at $194,900, and a four-bedroom Cape at 72 Serrel Sweet Rd., priced at $169,900.

Johnston’s median single-family house price for 2013, $169,000, increased by nearly 9 percent compared with 2012, when it was $155,500, according to statistics from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors.